City Hopper

Inspiration

My prior experience with AR games using Google Cloud Anchors ignited my interest in exploring the vast possibilities of the Geospatial API for crafting AR gaming experiences in larger spaces. This inspiration fueled my participation in this challenge, leading to the creation of my first Geospatial minigame. I firmly believe that AR holds immense potential to bridge the gap between virtual and physical worlds. With this vision in mind, I envisioned a game that seamlessly integrates local business information and rewards top players with prizes from participating businesses. Moreover, I believe that such games can serve as a unique platform for players to discover local businesses and other places of interest, fostering a deeper connection with the surrounding community.

What it does

City Hopper is a time-trial adventure through the vibrant city square of María Pita, in A Coruña (Spain), guiding a mischievous bunny on its quest to reach its coveted carrot and uncovering hidden clues along the way. These clues reveal valuable information about local businesses, inviting players to discover new places and engage with them. For instance, a nearby restaurant might be one of the hidden locations, providing enticing information about its products and allowing players to book reservations directly through the game. The game's competitive time trial format adds an extra layer of excitement, challenging players to reach the carrot as quickly as possible to secure a top spot on the leaderboard and potentially win prizes from the hidden businesses While the game is currently designed for this specific location, new scenes for other locations can be effortlessly generated by utilizing the same assets or adding new ones.

How we built it

City Hopper is built using Unity and the Geospatial Creator API. I initially tried using the Streetscape Geometry API for occlusions, but the provided geometry wasn't accurate enough for the selected location. However, I'm interested in exploring this further for other locations with better Building LOD in the future. Most of the 3D assets were designed from scratch using Blender, focusing on lightweight assets and optimized scripts to ensure smooth gameplay on mid-range to low-end devices. Due to time constraints, the ranking system shown in the video demo is currently a mockup. I plan to implement a fully functional ranking system using Firestore DB, which I anticipate will be a relatively quick process as I already have most of the code from similar projects.

Challenges we ran into

One of the obvious challenges for this type of experiences is the careful consideration of spatial coordinates, object placement, and occlusion techniques to create a visually coherent and immersive AR game. Since the Streetscape API wasn't accurate enough for my chosen location, I had to manually create the occluding surfaces for the different assets. Fortunately, the visual guidance provided by the map tiles in the Geospatial Creator API made this task relatively straightforward. I think the final result is quite accurate and closely matches the actual geometries of the buildings in the plaza. Another challenge was adapting the traditional 3D platform game mechanics to an AR environment. While using traditional arrow controls was an option, I felt this would be too demanding for users who are also focusing on positioning their phone's camera to the right spot. Instead, I aimed to find the simplest and most natural approach. I decided to keep just one button for jumping and to move the bunny by pointing the phone camera in the desired direction. In effect, this is a 2.5D platform game, where the bunny can only move in one direction at each location. The camera's focus determines whether the bunny moves left or right. To ensure that these game controls were easy to use from the center of the square, I carefully tested them in all the areas where the bunny could go. I think the final result works pretty well and it is very natural to use, especially for young children or people that who are not so used to playing videogames. Interestingly, when I went to the square to record the video submission, council workers began installing the Christmas tree in the center of the square (of course), preventing me from recording from the ideal location. This unexpected obstacle highlights the challenges and excitement of creating real-world AR experiences. Fortunately, the game controls were robust enough to allow for smooth gameplay from a secondary spot, as seen in the video.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

I think City Hopper is a super fun experience that can be played by all audiences, which was the primary goal when I started the project. I firmly believe in the power of these experiences to encourage people to step out of their homes and explore their cities, fostering a deeper connection with their surroundings and fostering a sense of community. This realization further fuels my desire to continue contributing to the development of such experiences in the future.

What we learned

I learned mostly from the challenges I mentioned earlier.

What's next for City Hopper

My plan is to soon integrate an improved version of City Hopper into Fleepas, an AR gaming app that I developed specifically for this type of location-based gaming experience. I will probably start with María Pita's stage, but it would be great to find more cities interested in including a version of City Hopper of their most iconic landmarks. This expansion would not only broaden the game's reach but also provide a unique platform for cities and businesses to engage residents and visitors alike.